


no one throwing lightning

by dustofwarfare



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Lunardyn Week, World of Ruin, there's a brief kiss but it's mostly just a blessing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-02
Updated: 2018-05-02
Packaged: 2019-05-01 01:20:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14509383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dustofwarfare/pseuds/dustofwarfare
Summary: Ardyn hates her because he is anathema to everything she is and everything he once was. She is the sacred, he is the profane. She heals, he destroys. She speaks for the gods, he rails against them. Perhaps there is nothing they could ever be to each other but this.Ardyn returns to the Citadel in solitary triumph to await the ascension of the Chosen King -- and every few years, he receives an unexpected visitor.





	no one throwing lightning

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [нет того, кто мечет молнии](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17541683) by [Cyber_Akitsu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyber_Akitsu/pseuds/Cyber_Akitsu)



> I wrote this for the "Lightness and darkness" prompt for Lunardyn Week! It's late because I'm terrible at finishing prompts on their assigned days but! Only by a day? :D? (This particular fic is gen/character study, though at some point I will def. write something shippy with these two because I am predictable.) 
> 
> My thanks to Marmolita for the beta, and adding in my missing "a" in daemons xDD 
> 
> Title/lyrics are from the song "Blood of Angels" by Brown Bird. It's a song about railing against the gods you no longer believe in, and I feel like it's literally Ardyn's anthem.

_I drank the blood of angels from a bottle_

_just to see if I could call the lightning down_

_it hasn’t struck me yet_

_and I would wage my soul to bet_

_that there ain’t no one throwing lightning anyhow_

 

When the sun finally sets for good, Ardyn makes his way to Insomnia.

He leaves the frozen wasteland of the former Niflheim Empire behind him, traveling by dropship to Steyliff Grove to retrieve his car. The perpetual darkness delights him, and he takes a few hours just to sit out by the dark waters of the Vesperpool and watch the daemons dance.

A few approach him cautiously, and Ardyn smiles and beckons them closer. A naga peers at him from a safe distance, perhaps not entirely sure if he means her harm or not. The greater daemons have a bit more sense and seem to know when they’re in the presence of an alpha predator, though of course Ardyn has no intention of harming her. He simply nods and lets her be. He’s spent a great deal of time alone; if it is her wish, she is welcome to enjoy her solitude.

But a necromancer, a psycomancer, and a host of imps and erishkegals eventually make their way over. Ardyn reaches a hand out and they come closer, winding about him like kittens seeking affection. The mancers, he seems to recall, were once humans who could use magic. Mages, they were called in his day.

Of course they are nothing now but what the Scourge has made them; twisted bones, tattered remnants of human clothes gone to rot, and tainted magic sparking bright in the dark night.

“And why shouldn’t you have dominion over the earth for a little while, hmm? The King of Light sleeps in his crystal tomb, and I know well how long you have waited.” He speaks in Old Lucian simply because he can. The daemons do not understand his words, but he thinks they rather understand the gist of it.

The daemons drift away, and Ardyn goes back to his car. He drives on dark empty roads without bothering with headlights, flipping idly through radio stations broadcasting either static or frantic instructions to a terrified human population. Ardyn turns it off after a few moments. To no longer care about the affairs of men is a delight.

Ardyn drives, the wind in his hair and the daemons spawning all around him in ecstatic revelry. There are screams, every now and then, especially as he passes the more populated areas. It is the most beautiful music he has ever heard.

***

Ardyn leaves the car parked outside the gates of Insomnia. There are people there, soldiers, and how touching – it seems to be an Imperial garrison _and_ a contingent of Kingsglaives.

 _Behold as the endless night finally brings peace between Niflheim and Lucis._ Ardyn laughs out loud. Why, someone ought to give him a commendation.

“Halt, there!” someone calls, and he thinks he hears one of the Imperials say _is that the Chancellor?_

_Not anymore._

Ardyn stops, bows, and then turns his attention to the collection of floodlights that have been erected in front of the gates to keep the daemons away. He aims his finger and mimics shooting each light – he picked this gesture up from Prompto – and watches as they shatter, one after the other.

He is barraged by bullets and magic and swords, but as always, they fall around him as gentle and impotent as rain.

The daemons creep in with the shadows. Ardyn turns his back on the entire affair and, humming a song no one left living could possibly remember, walks into Insomnia alone.

***

The city was never actually named _Insomnia._

He’s read many scholars over the years try and explain how the Crown City came to be called that, and the accepted theory is, of course, that it’s named after Ardyn’s brother, Somnus. The so-called Founder King who cast him aside.

It isn’t.

It’s strange; Ardyn has imagined the moment where he walks triumphant into Insomnia, the eternal night called down and the Scourge following on his heels, for _years._

And he finds that while he feels the expected satisfaction gained from a plan well-thought and almost perfectly executed, he is surprisingly not thinking much of his brother or the kingdom that should have been his. Perhaps it is because, over the thousands of years he has walked this accursed planet, he has come to understand a few things about kings and power and the lengths to which men will go to achieve it.

Or perhaps it is because he can longer recall his brother’s face; when he tries to summon up a memory, it is Noctis he sees instead.

As it should be, he supposes.

Daemons flank him as he walks, his footsteps echoing on empty streets full of rubble and debris from the attack. No one calls out to him or tries to impede his solitary triumphal procession to the Citadel.

Insomnia, it would seem, sleeps at last.

The Citadel rises into the dark sky, a monument of shattered stones and broken history. Ardyn stops and stares up at it for a long time.

_How easily do they fall into ruin, the things men build._

The historians did not know about the temple that once stood here – a simple thing, really, in the old Solheim style. In the courtyard there was a fountain of cool water, and Ardyn would receive those who were afflicted with the Scourge and heal them. Day or night, he would not turn any away who came to seek his aid.

 _Templum Medicus Insomnem,_ it was called _._

The Temple of the Sleepless Healer.

No, this city was not named after Somnus. It was named after _him_ , and Ardyn had finally returned to take it back.

***

He does not know when she first appears to him, as he long ago stopped marking the passage of days even before the sun followed suit.

Ardyn is in the garden, wondering if it could possibly be the courtyard from his temple of old or if such fancy is simple nostalgia. Somnus destroyed the temple after Ardyn’s execution and burned and salted the land upon which it stood; for all Ardyn knows, he might have erected the Temple of Bahamut over its location instead of the Citadel.

Few daemons venture toward the Citadel to keep him company as he waits for the King of Light’s return. Perhaps there are still remnants of the old magic in the stones themselves, or holy runes etched into the ground beneath. He is able to pass, so he supposes a strong enough daemon could, too. But Ardyn does not call for them. Like the naga, he does not mind his solitude.  

The royal gardens are overrun with weeds. There is a fountain, some silly thing with frolicking nymphs holding hands, the water turned sludge-thick with algae. There is still the faintest trickle of water from one of the nymph's mouths.

“I admire your perseverance, darling,” he says, and puts his hat on her head. “It’s not easy to remained so focused when everyone around you gives up, is it?”

He’s idly examining what was once a flowerbed, prodding the dirt with the toe of his boot, when he hears her voice.

“It is remarkable, is it not, how quickly nature reclaims that which man has abandoned?”

He stiffens and glances slightly over his shoulder. She is there, surrounded by a soft pillar of magic that is older than the Lucians, older even than the Scourge. She is not real, he knows that, for if she was still alive then his call to the dark would have gone unanswered.

But he has not, in all his long years, ever hallucinated the appearance of those who have moved beyond this world to the next. Is it a sign, then, that his accursed existence truly is marked for an end?

Ardyn turns and bows. “Lady Lunafreya. What an odd choice for a ghostly manifestation. Surely there are those who might appreciate it more than I.”

She smiles at him. It is a sweet smile. “You are thinking of the past, are you not? When you walked here, as the accursed, did you see the city as you left it long ago when you were mortal?”  

“I am thinking that I should really hire a new gardener,” he says, clucking his tongue. “This one clearly fell asleep on the job.”

He does not like the way she smiles, and he cannot help but remember her words to him on that pier in Altissia. _All those in thrall to the darkness shall find peace._

He struck her for that, but he’s not entirely sure why. It wasn’t as if it that wasn’t the entire crux of his plan. Perhaps he’d disliked her having the last word? No, he was more apt to find that impressive than infuriating. As long as it was a _good_ last word. It usually isn’t, in his experience.

No, Ardyn hates her because he is anathema to everything she is and everything he once was. She is the sacred, he is the profane. She heals, he destroys. She speaks for the gods, he rails against them. Perhaps there is nothing they could ever be to each other but this.

“I wish that I could have healed you,” she says, moving closer.

“Because you think it might change what will be?” he shakes his head. “Tch. You would save Noctis, knowing that the Astrals themselves have ordained what is to come? Why, my dear, that’s almost _rebellious_ of you.”

“I wish it as any healer wishes to cure those who suffer,” she says. “And do not mistake me, for you will fall where you once healed, and the King of Light shall be the last thing that you see.”

“Promises, promises,” says Ardyn, and retrieves his hat. “Go away. If I wish to watch something spouting off, I’ll come gaze at this fountain.”

She inclines her head, and she and her thrice-damned magic fades back into the dark.

***

The next time he sees her, some time has passed.

Ardyn has no notion how long Noctis will be entombed, festering in the Crystal’s wisdom or whatever he’s doing in there. So he amuses himself by thwarting every single attempt by the Glaive and the remaining Crownsguard to take back the Citadel, which also fails to hold his interest for longer than a year or two at least.

He can almost _smell_ the end of it in the air. It’s made him quite impatient.

Ardyn does not sleep or eat, but he does like to read. He finds the library and dusts off a few books, those which are not burned or waterlogged or full of bugs. He reads history books that are sometimes right but mostly wildly wrong, he reads plays and agricultural treatises and philosophical ramblings on the nature of the gods, he reads tawdry erotica that sometimes makes him laugh out loud.

He reads about Somnus’s descendants, though for the most part they’re quite a boring lot. He kept an eye on them throughout the years, of course, but as each generation failed to produce the Chosen King he mostly left them alone to play kings of the castle as they wished in peace.

There was the one – the Rogue Queen. She’d been entertaining, quite lusty and fond of violence. The history book dulls it all down to make it sound as if the most risqué thing she did was wear a pair of trousers.

He wonders what the history books shall say about him and Noctis.  If they will say anything of him at all.

There’s a chess set in one of the rooms on the way to the library, set up for a game that was never played before the city fell. It’s a bit of delightful symbolism that Ardyn likes, and he moves one of the red pieces for an opening gambit as he passes by. On his way back he notices someone has countered with one of the black. His eyebrows raise and he moves accordingly, waiting, but nothing happens.

Still. He does not think he imagined it. He’s always had quite the eye for detail _and_ games.

So he goes back into the library, finds a book, and reads.

On his way out, the black has moved once more.

“Hmm,” Ardyn says, and laughs. “Very well, then. Game on.”

***

Ardyn loses the match. He is _delighted._

***

“You might as well show yourself,” he says, setting the chessboard to rights once the game is over. “It’s doing neither of us any good to pretend you’re not here.”

She’s there in the next moment, barely a breath after he finishes speaking. “I’m very good at chess,” she says, sounding proud. “My brother taught me, and I never once beat him.”

“You might have switched the pieces round, when I wasn’t looking,” he says.

She wrinkles her nose and makes a face at him, a bit like a chastised child. “I did no such thing.”

It makes him laugh. He indicates the board with a sweep of his hand and she sits, settling across from him in a high-backed chair. He has to stop himself from remarking on how dusty the chair is. Some habits are difficult to break. And he is not used to spending time with the dead.

He wins the next match, and the next. He almost comments on it, but then she trounces him three games in a row – as if she let him win merely to figure out how he played.

Ardyn does not like the implication of that, but that doesn’t mean he’s not impressed.

***

“Why, precisely, do you continue to visit me?” he asks, the next time he sees her.

He says it as if it is a regular occurrence, but it is not; it has been a year or so since the chess game, he thinks, but he has no way of knowing for sure.

He is, at the moment, perched on the edge of the roof at the highest point in the Citadel – coat blowing in the wind, hat only affixed to his head by the sheer force of his daemonic will. He’s already had to warp down and retrieve it once. A vaguely embarrassing moment to be sure.

She leans against the wall and looks over at him, her hair blowing softly in the breeze. He remembers her standing on the rooftop of the Caelum Via the day she arrived in Insomnia; the night before it fell. He’d toasted her, then, in a moment of mockery. She’d looked right through him and pretended not to notice.

“I would know the man behind the Scourge,” she says, simply.

“You are too late for that, I’m afraid,” Ardyn says, quietly. He sees daemons manifesting out in the quiet streets of Insomnia. “He fell long ago, brought down by someone else’s greed and fear.” He glances up at her, perched precariously like a gargoyle. “Would you try and keep me from facing Noctis?”

“As I told you before, that has never been my intent, no.”

“You know he will not survive it,” Ardyn says, though he’s not sure why. He doesn’t want her to try and change any of it, and how _could_ she? She’s dead. “Even if he slays me here in front of his father’s throne, he must face me in the Beyond to truly banish the Scourge.”

“Yes,” Lunafreya says softly. “I know that. It is not my place to interfere with the will of the Astrals.”

Ardyn laughs unkindly. “You are as foolish as I was, believing they know what they’re doing. They don’t, you know.”

“It is not any man who could shoulder the burden of a cursed life,” she says, which, he cannot help but notice, is changing the subject.

Ardyn almost falls off the wall like his hat. “Are you _flattering_ me?”

“I told you. I was simply curious.” She studies him. “It was my fate to heal, to speak, and to die. It was yours to –”

“Oh, dear girl. Believe you me, I am _well_ aware of what happened and you’ll forgive me if I do not embrace it quite as _placidly_ as you,” he snarls, and he feels himself changing, the Scourge seeping out into his eyes, his skin.

“We do what we must,” Lady Lunafreya says, with the simpering piety of the martyr. “I cannot heal you or your affliction, and I know that it was never fated that I could. But I wish that might.”

“Why?” he asks, eyes narrowed. “Why would you _possibly_ wish that?”

“Compassion without judgement,” she says, softly. “It is the healer’s way. Surely you remember.”

Oh, he remembers. “Yes. And look where that got me,” he murmurs, and gathers hold of his temper. He’s already killed her. Her words are as meaningless as the wind. He waves a hand toward the daemons below. “And what will happen to them? They never asked to be what they are, either. What fate awaits my poor dear children when the King of Light purges the Scourge from the star for good?”

“They shall know peace,” she says, which is a completely useless, vague, likely Astral-approved answer if he’s ever heard one. She lays a hand on his arm. “Even now, you have a healer’s care for them.”

“You are in danger of making me someone I am not,” he says, staring down at her fingers. He frowns. The Scourge can sense her, but only barely. Enough to tug at it, but not enough to send it roiling like before. “My aims are purely selfish, I assure you.”

She inclines her head. “I do not disbelieve you. But tell me, Ardyn, what would you have done? Were it your brother who was meant to be king and rejected, instead of you? Would you have embraced him, remained loyal? Or would you have cast him aside, as he did you?”

“My dear, if you think I wish to spend any time debating _what if’s_ from two millennia ago, you are sadly mistaken.” Ardyn glances back at the daemons. He wants to call one, wishes for the company of his own kind. Lunafreya is but a shade and still, her light burns his eyes that were always meant to see only in the dark.

***

She does not come back for a long time. He thinks perhaps he might not see her again, but then she is there, curled up in a seat in the library where he goes to read.

“Tell me of old Solheim,” she says, without preamble. “You mutter to the books. Are they all wrong, then?”

“Lady Lunafreya,” Ardyn says, sighing theatrically. “I _killed you._ Is it an apology you’re after? You shan’t have one. Your death was a necessity, and I daresay by this point I have killed more people than I ever healed.”

“I am after nothing,” she says, “but a good story. Now, will you tell me one or not?”

He tells her. He thinks he knows what she is trying to do, make him remember his lost humanity, call to whatever she thinks is left of the healer inside of him. But for what purpose, he does not know. All he seeks from his redemption is oblivion and the end of his brother’s line. He does not wish to wake up in a promised land full of soft wind and sweet-smelling flowers. Leave that to her and even Noctis, he cares naught.

But he tells her, and she listens, and the years slip by, one after the other. Ardyn wonders at some point if he is really talking to anyone or, if someone approached, they would find him holding forth on ancient history to no one but himself.

But no one approaches, and he tells her the stories until one day she is not there.

***

He can feel it when Noctis returns.

It feels like that moment during a storm when the pressure breaks and the lightning finally strikes. Ardyn, in the midst of wandering about the Citadel and straightening the artwork – he does appreciate the quality – stops in his tracks.

His entire body seems to shudder with anticipation. Nothing in the last two thousand years has felt like this. Finally, _finally_ all his plans, everything he has schemed and waited and killed for, are about to come together.

_Come to me, Chosen King. Let us end this as it has always been meant to end._

Ardyn knows he will die here. _Finally._

“The time of the True King’s Ascension has come.”

“Would you believe, I’d noticed." Ardyn turns to her. He bows. “I cannot say I have enjoyed, nor understood, our sporadic moments together, Lady Lunafreya. But I hope that whatever it was you sought amidst my presence, you found it.”

She moves toward him, graceful and shimmering with the magic she took to her grave. “May you lay down your burden at last, and gain the redemption you seek.”

“Yes, yes. Go shepherd your sacrificial lamb to the wolf’s lair, darling. And when you watch your beloved die on the altar of the Astrals’ inability to solve their own problems, I do hope it brings you the peace _you_ seek.”

She leans in and kisses him. She tastes sweet, like a summer’s breeze, like the cool water in the fountain he used when he healed those who knelt before him for his blessing. Then she bows...and winks, almost saucily, less like a mystic and more like a woman who is trying not to laugh. “How sweet. But really, Ardyn Lucis Caelum. You first.”

 _Well played,_ he thinks, as she turns to walk away. _Well played, indeed._

  
  



End file.
